Technology In The 21st Century.docx

Adrian Cadiz BSN-1B Technology in the 21st Century Imagine living in a world without technology? Do you think your life will be easier or more complicated? Are you able to survive without technology? If technology didn’t exist, who knows where you may be? Without technology the world you would be living in would be nothing but an empty, cold, chaotic, boring, and dark place. As sad as it may seem, we can’t deny the fact that we rely our lives with technology. We are living in the 21st century – the era of technology. In today’s world, everything is more convenient and accessible due to the advancement of technology in almost all sectors. Technologies increases our standard of living. It makes our life easier and work faster. However, there are some people who believe that there are some aspects of technology that negatively impact our lives. In my opinion, technologies have a positive and negative effects to our lives depending on how it is used. The first positive impact of technology on our lives is communication. Technology serves as a platform for mankind to facilitate communication. With the ubiquity of online social networks, video chatting sites like Skype, Yahoo, smartphone applications such as Messenger, Whatsapp, communication has become a lot easier, faster and now we are able to transcend the boundaries of space and time. We no longer find ourselves separated from our love ones overseas, as communication technology has allowed us to keep in touch with them, cultivating closer relationships. The use of internet is rising rapidly. The world wide web connects over 100 million people around the world. With the help of the internet, we can communicate not only to our family but a larger group of people online. Take for example Facebook, this application allows us to freely express ourselves to the public. We upload pictures, stories, or videos that we considered

significant, and memorable to us. Sometimes we also share our feelings, or what we do at the moment by posting something on our newsfeeds. We can also react, share thoughts, and opinions to topics or posts that seems interesting to us. With the help of the internet, communication is not limited, but more extensive. However, some would argue that despite these benefits, technology has worsened the quality of life instead. This argument is undeniably true as technologies used for communication has caused depersonalized relationships, where some of us became socially awkward individuals who live virtual lives. Even when we meet people face to face day by day, they will be too engaged with their phones than their surrounding and people around them, resulting in the lack of communication. However as much as this is undeniably true, it is up to each individual to control himself or herself in using these technologies smartly and not letting them dictate his or her life. Another positive effect of technology is that it makes our works easier and faster. Manual work is already replaced with mechanical work. Before individuals would spend countless hours working on something, but now machines could do it in split seconds. Machinery has made our lives less arduous. Time, distance and convenience have made us more dependent on technology. In our house, we use different buttons easily to light up and control the temperature of our rooms. All our household work like washing, drying, cooking, and sometimes even sweeping are now done by machines. In doing school activities, technology has a great influence on us. As a student myself, I admit that I rely on technologies a lot. I use computer in making my notes. If I don’t know the topic that’s discussed by my teacher, I use my laptop to look for videos online, or whenever I have homework I tend to look for answers online. Sometimes in solving math problems, I rely on calculators. Another important thing that machineries have done to us is the invention of automobiles. Since people has invented machineries, we can easily reach on other

places. Modern transportation such as air conditioning cars, fast trains and airplanes makes our journey smooth and fast. That is why people can go anywhere they want to go. Indeed, technologies helps us but it made us lazy. We became too attuned and dependent to it that it has almost unthinkable and impossible to live without it. We are so much addicted to technology that we have made ourselves unwitted slaves of technology. In doing household chores we can do it without the reliance of technology. Washing clothes, and plates, sweeping and scrubbing the floor, cleaning the bathroom, we can do it by ourselves. It is more effective if we do it manually because doing chores is a good form of exercise making our body more healthy, less prone in getting fat. Doing our chores manually, will help us strengthen our hygiene practices thus minimizing the risk for us of having diseases and infections. Another downside of technologies is that it limits our capacities to think especially the students. Students are now constantly relying on digital books, or pdf’s than reading a book, which is the main reason why a lot of them developed nearsightedness because digital technologies emits UV radiation that damages the eyes. Another negative example is when a student has a research or homework, all he’s going to do is type the word in the internet and he’ll copy and paste the information and prints it, rather than he’ll borrow books from the library and read it one by one. Students spend less time in reading a book, but enjoys more time in browsing social networking sites. Internet is a medium to access information easily and faster, but it is also one of the reason why students were getting lazy. Lastly, technology gives miraculous advancement in the field of medicine. Before surgeries have higher mortality rates but now with the use of technologies surgeries are less invasive and can detect diseases early and more accurately. Examples of these technologies are CT Scan, PET, and MRI. Computerized Tomography scanner uses x-rays and a computer to make pictures of organs inside the body. It takes pictures of cross section of the body organs. The benefits are that

details of parts inside the body such as lungs and blood vessels are obtained without using surgery. The CT scans uses radiations that are accurate, fast, and painless and leave no radiations after the scan is finished. Positron Emission Tomography a body scanning method that detects radioactive substances injected into the body. It is used to provide information on function and help differentiate normal tissue from cancer, rather that information on structure. The Magnetic Resonance Imaging technique has been used primarily to produce high quality images of the inside human body structures in medical settings. It produces detailed images of organs and tissues throughout the body without the need of x-rays. These inventions are helpful to cure many diseases like diabetes, asthma, HIV, and cancer etc. With the help of technology medical sciences very progressive and there are so many medicines which save many innocents lives. It also improves the health of many people and increases the average life of human beings. Though many lives are cured by technologies, a lot of living organisms die due to its effect on the environment. Technology such as cars and motorcycles emit blacks that cause air pollution. Industrialization as a result of new technology mostly releases many gases to the environment as a result of pollution that is release of the harmful gases caused eroding of the ozone layer resulting to global warming. The polar ice caps are now melting as result of climate change. More and more animals become extinct because of pollution and changes of temperature of the environment. Not only animals, but people are now suffering as from the dirty and polluted environment. Skin diseases, and respiratory problems, and infections are some of the illness that someone might get because of a dirty surroundings caused by technology. All in all, every coin has two sides one positive and one negative. So same in with technology if it has benefits it has also some negative effects. We should remember that we need to need to properly use them, for the sake of ourselves and for the goodness of many.

SOURCES CITED

WEBSITES

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